Faculty

New: Objects of Art; Objects of Property

By Gregory S. Alexander

Seemingly worlds apart, art and the law of property in fact share much in common. Some of this shared space is obvious, the result of their intersection through property law's protection and regulation of art. But another aspect of their commonality is considerably less obvious. Both rely, implicitly and in ways not always acknowledged, on assumptions about objects in the world-thing-ness. That is, both have relied, or traditionally have done so, on certain assumptions about the nature of objects-the objects of art and the objects of property-and the upshot of those assumptions is that those objects are characterized by thing-ness, i.e., physicality, tangibility, stability, durability. Further, these assumptions are not only parallel to each realm but intersect with each other in functional ways. Notably, property law's interaction with art depends upon art's assumption of its own thing-ness, for property law itself traditionally has depended upon certain assumptions regarding ...

New: Kompetenz-Kompetenz and Its Negative Effect — A Comparative View

By John J. Barceló

The paper deals with the “negative-effect”-of-Kompetenz-Kompetenz doctrine in some of the major arbitration venues, France, Germany, Switzerland, the U.S., England and Canada (Quebec). The negative effect doctrine refers to the circumstances under which a national court, before which a case is pending, will refrain (or not) from a full review of whether an alleged arbitration agreement (requiring arbitration of the parties’ dispute) exists as between the parties, is valid, and covers the dispute — in deference to allowing the arbitrators to decide those issues in the first instance. Although national jurisdictions universally accept the “positive” Kompetenz-Kompetenz doctrine — under which arbitrators are authorized to decide their own jurisdiction, although not with finality — they follow dramatically different approaches to the “negative-effect” issue. After canvassing and analyzing how the major jurisdictions just mentioned approach the negative-effect doctrine, the paper ...

REVISION: Mitigation Matters

By John H. Blume

Mitigation matters. It works. It literally saves lives every day, often in cases in which a death sentence seems a foregone conclusion. But mitigation matters — it works — only if the capital defense team is committed both to conducting a comprehensive investigation of the client’s life and to developing and integrating the results of the investigation into a compelling, credible narrative for life. This commitment to uncovering and telling the client’s true story must be complete and unwavering. When it is, life sentences follow. When it is not, undeserved death sentences are imposed.

New: Balanced Judicial Realism in the Service of Justice: Judge Richard D. Cudahy

By Cynthia Grant Bowman

There is a quiet irony to be found in scholarly writings about the judiciary, which often center around high-profile jurists selected as the “great” judges. But there are great judges who do not receive or even want such widespread recognition, and who do not discuss their philosophy of judging—they simply focus on the job in front of them. Judges who operate with humility can often be very quiet about their legacies—brushing the issue off, as if uncomfortable with the attention. Anyone who knew Judge Richard D. Cudahy of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit will recognize this description. In some ways, that kind of reticence makes writing about his jurisprudence more than a little challenging. But in other ways, it invites us to examine what this “judges’ judge” exemplified as he worked at his craft. In reflecting on this, perhaps we can understand that craft more deeply.

REVISION: How Constitutional Norms Break Down

By Josh Chafetz

From the moment Donald Trump was elected President, critics have anguished over a breakdown in constitutional norms. History demonstrates, however, that constitutional norms are perpetually in flux. The principal source of instability is not that these unwritten rules can be destroyed by politicians who deny their legitimacy, their validity, or their value. Rather, the principal source of instability is that constitutional norms can be decomposed—dynamically interpreted and applied in ways that are held out as compliant but end up limiting their capacity to constrain the conduct of government officials. This Article calls attention to that latent instability and, in so doing, begins to taxonomize and theorize the structure of constitutional norm change. We explore some of the different modes in which unwritten norms break down in our constitutional system and the different dangers and opportunities associated with each. Moreover, we argue that under certain plausible ...

REVISION: Common Sense on Standards of Proof

By Kevin M. Clermont

The law speaks clearly on the standards of proof, but listeners often misunderstand its words. This article tries, with some common sense and a modicum of multivalent logic, to explain how the law expects its standards to be applied, and then to show how the law thereby avoids such complications as the conjunction paradox. First, in accordance with belief function theory, the factfinder should start at zero belief. Given imperfect evidence, the factfinder will end up retaining a fair amount of uncommitted belief. As evidence comes in, though, the factfinder will form a belief in the truth of the disputed fact but also form a disbelief, or a belief in the fact’s falsity. At the close of evidence, the standard of proof requires only comparing belief and disbelief. For example, the civil standard, rather than asking whether a fact more likely than not happened according to traditional probability theory, asks whether the factfinder believes in the fact’s happening more than the ...

New: A Cooperative Federalism Approach to Shareholder Arbitration

By Zachary D. Clopton

Arbitration dominates private law across an ever-expanding range of fields. Its latest target, however, may not be a new field as much as a new form: mandatory arbitration pro-visions built into corporate charters and bylaws. Recent developments in corporate law coupled with signals from the Securities and Exchange Commission suggest that regulators may be newly receptive to shareholder arbitration. What they do next may have dramatic consequences for whether and how corporate and securities laws are enforced. The debate about the merits of arbitration is well worn, but its application to shareholder claims opens the door to a different set of responses. In particular, the overlapping authority of federal and state actors with respect to corporate law calls for approaches that sound in cooperative federalism. Yet cooperative-federalist approaches have been absent from recent debates about shareholder arbitration. This Essay explains why cooperative federalism is a natural fit for ...

REVISION: The Conviction of Andrea Yates: A Narrative of Denial

By Sherry F. Colb

This paper discusses the case of Andrea Yates, the woman who confessed to drowning her five children to death and was subsequently convicted of murder, (though the conviction has since been overturned). In this piece, Colb contends that Andrea Yates was convicted because of the jurors’ emotional/psychological response to the possibility that postpartum psychosis could cause an otherwise decent person to commit such brutal acts. As a symptom of denial, Colb argues, the jury rejected the insanity defense and thereby reassured itself that only evil people could do what Yates did. If that were the case, then it would be fine to continue to ignore the issue of mental illness in general and its impact on postpartum women in particular.

REVISION: Affirmative Power to Strip State Courts of Jurisdiction

By Michael C. Dorf

The very substantial literature on the scope of congressional power to strip courts of jurisdiction contains a gap: it does not discuss the source of the affirmative power of Congress to strip state courts of their jurisdiction. Laws granting exclusive federal court jurisdiction over some category of cases are necessary and proper to the exercise of the power to ordain and establish lower federal courts, but what power does Congress exercise when it strips both state and federal courts of jurisdiction? The answer depends on the nature of the case. In stripping all courts of the power to hear federal statutory claims and challenges to federal statutes, Congress exercises whatever affirmative power authorizes the substantive statute. However, Congress lacks affirmative power to strip all courts of the power to hear constitutional challenges to state laws. That conclusion is important in its own right but also complements views — such as Henry Hart’s contention that the Supreme Court ...

REVISION: Introduction: The Place of Agencies in Polarized Government

By Cynthia R. Farina

This is one of two complementary essays for a symposium honoring the work of Peter L. Strauss. Also included is the joint introduction. (The second essay is Gillian Metzger, Agencies, Polarization, and the States.) These essays engage one of Strauss’s most germinal writings, “The Place of Agencies in Government: Separation of Powers and the Fourth Branch” to consider whether contemporary polarized politics spells the end of the intricate system of multi-branch control and accountability which, Strauss argued, legitimates administrative agencies. Political polarization has become a major focus in contemporary discussions on congressional activity and governance. The tone of these discussions has grown increasingly grim, as many political scientists, argue that a constitutional system of divided and shared powers hardens current levels of partisan warfare into legislative gridlock. Proposals for reform abound. Scholars and political commentators have called for modifications to the ...

REVISION: Agency and Insanity

By Stephen P. Garvey

This Article offers an unorthodox theory of insanity. According to the traditional theory, insanity is a cognitive or volitional incapacity arising from a mental disease or defect. As an alternative to the traditional theory, some commentators have proposed that insanity is an especially debilitating form of irrationality. Each of these theories faces fair-minded objections. In contrast to these theories, this Article proposes that a person is insane if and because he lacks a sense of agency. The theory of insanity it defends might therefore be called the lost-agency theory. According to the lost-agency theory, a person lacks a sense of agency when he experiences his mind and body moving but doesn’t experience himself as the author or agent of those movements. The title character in the movie Dr. Strangelove suffered from what’s known as alien hand syndrome. People suffering from this syndrome experience the moving hand as their hand but don’t experience themselves as the author or ...

New: From Meaning to Money: Translating Injury Into Dollars

By Valerie Hans

Legal systems often require the translation of qualitative assessments into quantitative judgments, yet the qualitative-to-quantitative conversion is a challenging, understudied process. We conducted an experimental test of predictions from a new theory of juror damage award decision making, examining how 154 lay people engaged in the translation process in recommending money damages for pain and suffering in a personal injury tort case. The experiment varied the presence, size, and meaningfulness of an anchor number to determine how these factors influenced monetary award judgments, perceived difficulty, and subjective meaningfulness of awards. As predicted, variability in awards was high, with awards participants considered to be “medium” (rather than “low” or “high”) having the most dispersion. The gist of awards as low, medium, or high fully mediated the relationship between perceived pain/suffering and award amount. Moreover, controlling for participants’ perceptions of ...

New: Areeda-Turner 'Down Under': Predatory Pricing in Australia Before and after Boral

By George A. Hay

In the only predatory pricing case in Australia to reach the High Court, the ideas and recommendations contained in the 1975 Harvard law Review article by Phillip Areeda and Donald Turner were at the heart of the case. That case, the Boral case, decided by the High Court in 2003, raised a number of interesting issues regarding whether and how the test proposed by Areeda and Turner should be employed to deal with price cuts by large firms aimed at competitors. Equally importantly, the case raised some fundamental questions about whether there was a serious “gap” in the Australian equivalent of Section 2 of the Sherman Act - Section 46 of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, formerly the Trade Practices Act 1974 (TPA) - which made it difficult to challenge predatory conduct. Boral led immediately to some radical changes in the TPA but, even today, more than 10 years after Boral, Australians are still struggling to come up with the right statutory framework to deal with predatory ...

REVISION: 2017 Monsanto Lecture: The Complicated Business of State Supreme Court Elections: An Empirical Perspective

By Michael Heise

Proponents of judicial elections and related campaign activities emphasize existing First Amendment jurisprudence as well as similarities linking publicly elected state judges and other publicly-elected state officials. Opponents focus on judicial campaign contributions’ corrosive effects, including their potential to unduly influence judicial outcomes. Using a comprehensive data set of 2,345 business-related cases decided by state supreme courts across all fifty states between 2010–12, judicial election critics, including Professor Joanna Shepherd, emphasize the potential for bias and find that campaign contributions from business sources to state supreme court judicial candidates corresponded with candidates’ pro-business votes as justices. While Shepherd’s main findings generally replicate, additional (and alternative) analyses introduce new findings that raise complicating wrinkles for Shepherd’s strong normative claims. Findings from this study illustrate that efforts to ...

REVISION: Consumer Internet Standard Form Contracts in India: A Proposal

By Robert A. Hillman

India has experienced a dramatic increase in consumer Internet shopping due to its convenience and the myriad choices of the Internet. Further, India enjoys a rapidly developing economy, rising living standards, and improving middle-class income, all of which promote Internet shopping. However, worldwide, few consumers read their e-standard forms and India is likely no exception. In addition, the legal framework in India is inadequate to police vendor opportunism in the form of drafting unfair e-standard terms. Because consumer confidence is a prerequisite to growing Internet commerce, a more comprehensive and direct solution would be beneficial to India’s economy Consumer Internet Standard Form Contracts in India: A Proposal first examines existing strategies to protect consumers and concludes they may be inadequate. The article argues that the most promising approach to consumer protection comes from the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. ...

REVISION: The Finance Franchise

By Robert Hockett & Saule Omarova

The dominant view of banks and other financial institutions is that they function primarily as intermediaries, managing flows of scarce funds from those who have accumulated them to those who have need of them and can pay for their use. This understanding pervades textbooks, scholarly writings, and policy discussions – yet it is fundamentally false as a description of how a modern financial system works. Finance today is no more primarily “intermediated” than it is pre-accumulated or scarce. This Article challenges the outdated narrative of finance as intermediated scarce private capital and maps the basic structure and dynamics of the financial system as it actually operates. We begin by developing a three-part taxonomy of ways to model financial flows – what we call the “credit-intermediation,” “credit-multiplication,” and “credit-generation” models of finance. We show that only the last model captures the core dynamic of a complex modern financial system, and that the ultimate ...

REVISION: When Empathy Bites Back: Cautionary Tales from Neuroscience for Capital Sentencing

By Sheri Lynn Johnson

Empathy lies at the core of the capital trial. If jurors come to see the defendant as “different,” “other,” or not “fully human,” they are more likely to determine that the defendant “deserves” the ultimate punishment, making what the Supreme Court has described as essentially a moral judgment about the value of the life of the accused. Conversely, if jurors can identify with the defendant, imagine his “walk in life,” or “see the world through his eyes,” they are less likely to choose the death penalty. Despite its importance and decades of research, empathy is not clearly understood, and its implications for capital trials are largely unexplored. This Article examines the implications of emerging neuroscientific findings regarding empathy for capital trials. We consider implications for jury selection, the presentation of evidence, and arguments by counsel. We conclude that the neuroscience findings we have summarized provide additional support for our prior conviction: It is not ...

New: The Supreme Court of India: An Empirical Overview

By Sital Kalantry

The Indian Supreme Court has been called “the most powerful court in the world” for its wide jurisdiction, its expansive understanding of its own powers, and the billion plus people under its authority. Yet no up-to-date, empirical account exists of who is being heard by the Court, for what purposes, and with what levels of success. Both due to its fragmented bench structure (where cases are usually decided by only two or three out of thirty-one judges) as well as the large volume of cases (nearly 1000 merits judgments per year), scholars and policy makers have a very uneven picture of the court’s functioning: deep knowledge about the more visible, “high-profile” cases, and near-absolute silence about more mundane, but potentially equally important, decisions. This paper aims to fill this gap with a rigorous, empirical account of the functioning of the Court. We have collected, hand-coded, and analyzed data on over 5000 Indian Supreme Court opinions rendered from 2010 to 2015. This ...

REVISION: Law in Hiding: Market Principles in the Global Legal Order

By Odette Lienau

Standing in the background of the global legal order are a range of what might be called “market principles” or “market givens”-collective presentations or beliefs about how markets work-which are treated as objective descriptions at a particular time and place. This Article argues that such market givens should be understood as a kind of “law in hiding,” shaping the policy space available to states and other actors and affecting global legal developments in important but unrecognized ways. Drawing on examples from global financial law, rules on capital mobility, and sovereign debt practices, I demonstrate how market principles can provide the real substantive content for conventionally recognized law, effectively counter official law, and act as powerful rules in the absence of clear legal standards. I further consider why “law” is a suitable categorization for these market principles, adopting a broad definition that derives from and pushes forward recent international legal ...

New: Private Law and the Future of Patents

By Oskar Liivak

As it operates today, patent law does not qualify as private law and, without change, I doubt it ever will. For some, this is as it should be and any private law aspects that remain in the patent system should be purged. The basic argument is that the dominant theory of patents is just not compatible with private law and patent doctrine should reflect a pure public law theoretical basis. I agree that today's dominant patent theory is incompatible with private law principles. Yet agreeing with that inherent incompatibility does not imply that doctrine needs to be reformed. There is an alternative. Patent theory can be adjusted instead. This article points to an emerging innovation-focused basis for patent law that is explicitly private law. Not only does that lead to consistency, the change also offers a desperately needed promise of private law. Private law institutions offer the potential for extremely low administration costs. Private law institutions function smoothly ...

REVISION: The Right to Punishment for International Crimes

By Jens David Ohlin

On October 1, 2002, Magnus Gäfgen was taken into custody by the Frankfurt police in connection with the kidnapping of a young boy held for ransom. The police threatened Gäfgen with various forms of torture unless he divulged the location of the boy. Gäfgen quickly relented and led the police to the boy, who was already dead. Gäfgen was convicted of murder and the police were convicted of coercion. However, the district court concluded that the police, though culpable, were not appropriate subjects of punishment. Gäfgen, unhappy that his torturers were not punished, filed a case against Germany at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that Germany's failure to punish his torturers violated his human rights. The ECHR concluded that Gäfgen was right--the German government was obligated to punish perpetrators of torture, and by failing to do so adequately, Germany violated Gäfgen's human rights. The goal of this chapter is to show that the argument in Gäfgen is ...

REVISION: Private Wealth and Public Goods: A Case for a National Investment Authority

By Robert C. Hockett & Saule T. Omarova

Much American electoral and policy debate now centers on how best to reignite the nation’s economic dynamism and rebuild its competitive strength. Any such undertaking presents an extraordinary challenge, demanding a correspondingly extraordinary institutional response. This Article proposes precisely such a response. It designs and advocates a new public instrumentality--a National Investment Authority (“NIA”)--charged with the critical task of devising and implementing a comprehensive long-term development strategy for the United States.Patterned in part after the New Deal-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation, in part after modern sovereign wealth funds, and in part after private equity and venture capital firms, the NIA is an inherently hybrid, public-private entity that combines the unique strengths of public instrumentalities--their vast scale, lengthy investment horizons, and explicit backing by the public’s full faith and credit--with the micro-informational advantages of ...

REVISION: Land Use Regulation (Second Edition)

By Eduardo M. Peñalver

This casebook offers a concise, user-friendly presentation of land use law which incorporates a focus on critical thinking and practice throughout. The casebook devotes an entire chapter to complex and realistic scenarios that provide students an opportunity to bring to bear what they have learned throughout the semester to solve challenging legal and strategic problems. New materials in the second edition ensure that students will become familiar with the latest trends in land use law. Attached is the table of contents.

REVISION: The Politics of Legal Empirics: Do Political Attitudes Predict the Results of Empirical Legal Scholarship?

By Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Empirical legal scholarship has emerged as a dominant trend in legal scholarship. At its best, empirical scholarship subjects assertions about the effect of legal rules to a neutral test. But is empirical inquiry truly neutral? The validity of an empirical study should rest on the reliability of the methods used, rather than the political implications of its conclusions. Scholars might choose targets of inquiry, sources of data, or methods of analysis that support their political allegiances. This paper tests this thesis by matching the political beliefs of authors of empirical legal scholarship with the results of their research. The political allegiances of authors mildly correlate with the results of empirical inquiry in legal scholarship.

REVISION: Constitutionalism and the Foundations of the Security State

By Aziz F. Rana

Scholars often argue that the culture of American constitutionalism provides an important constraint on aggressive national security practices. This article challenges the conventional account by highlighting instead how modern constitutional reverence emerged in tandem with the national security state, functioning critically to reinforce and legitimate government power rather than simply to place limits on it. This unacknowledged security origin of today’s constitutional climate speaks to a profound ambiguity in the type of public culture ultimately promoted by the Constitution. Scholars are clearly right to note that constitutional loyalty has created political space for arguments more respectful of civil rights and civil liberties, making the very worst excesses of the past less likely. But at the same time, public discussion around protecting the Constitution – and with it a distinctively American way of life – has also served as a key justification for strengthening the ...

REVISION: Diplomacy and Its Others: The Case of Comfort Women

By Annelise Riles

The “Comfort Women incident,” now at least several decades old, troubles the familiar view of law as a funnel for politics. Viewed as a funnel, the wide range of legal, political, cultural, and diplomatic efforts to seek or resist redress for the system of sexual slavery institutionalized by the Japanese military during the Second World War would be assessed as ultimately pushing in the same direction: toward vindicating human rights. We see in the Comfort Women incident a far more chaotic interaction of law and politics. As critical legal feminist, we are concerned with finding a truthful and ethical way to respond to the horrors of sexual slavery, while also recognizing that claims on behalf of victims are often appropriated by nationalist, imperialist, and capitalist agendas. The first step in our project on the place of multi-situational law in a multi-situational politics of responses to the Comfort Women issue, this brief presentation identifies what we term the diplomatic ...

New: Megafirms

By Stewart J. Schwab

This Article documents and explains the amazing growth of the largest firms in law, accounting, and investment banking. Scholars to date have used various supply-side theories to explain this growth, and have generally examined only one industry at a time. This Article emphasizes a demand-side explanation of firm growth and shows how the explanation is similar for firms in all "project" industries. Legal regulation also plays an important role in determining industry structure. Among the areas covered in this Article are the growth of Multidisciplinary Practice firms (MDPs). MDP growth can best be understood by looking more broadly at the demand forces driving project industries. This Article also applies its framework to the breakup of the Big Five accounting firms, to the consolidation trend in the investment banking industry, and to the divergent growth patterns of the law firms in the plaintiffs' securities litigation field.

New: Expanding the Reach of the Commodity Exchange Act's Antitrust Considerations

By Gregory Scopino

In recent years, a small group of financial institutions have paid billions of dollars to settle civil and criminal claims that they formed cartels to rig the prices of certain critically important financial instruments and to stifle competition in others. For example, bankers would rig global benchmark interest rates for the purposes of benefitting their trading positions in over-the-counter (OTC) interest-rate swaps, which are bets on future interest rate movements. By conspiring with horizontal competitors to fix the benchmarks that were components of the prices of financial instruments, financial institutions and their employees harmed competition by warping the normal market factors that governed the prices of those instruments. The U.S. regulator for these markets, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has broad authority to combat fraud and market manipulation, but it is not feasible to place all relevant forms of misconduct into one of those two categories. ...

REVISION: The Rationality of Promising

By Emily L. Sherwin

This essay first examines various conceptions of promissory obligation, which suggest a range of possible benefits associated with promising. Theories of temporally extended practical rationality suggest that to obtain benefits of this kind, it may be rational for a promisor to treat his or her promise as binding. The difficulty is that, whatever practical and normative benefits binding promises may have, it will not always be epistemically rational for the promisor to perform. Thus, to the extent that markets rely on binding promises, they rely on an element of irrationality in human decision-making.

REVISION: Corporate Governance as Privately-Ordered Public Policy: A Proposal

By Lynn Stout & Sergio Gramitto

In this Article, we show how our society can use corporate governance shifts to address, if not entirely resolve, a number of currently pressing social and economic problems. These problems include: rising income inequality; demographic disparities in wealth and equity ownership; increasing poverty and income insecurity; a need for greater innovation and investment in solving problems like disease and climate change; the “externalization” of many costs of corporate activity onto third parties such as customers, employees, creditors, and the broader society; the corrosive influence of corporate money in politics; and discontent and loss of trust in the capitalist system among a large and growing segment of the population.We demonstrate how, to a very significant extent, these problems can be traced to the way shares in business corporations are currently owned, traded, and voted. We also offer a plausible plan for shifting the structure of share ownership, trading, and voting to ...

REVISION: Transnational Migration, Globalization, and Governance: Reflections on the Central America – United States Immigration Crisis

By Chantal Thomas

The Central America - U.S. border crisis has stoked the fires of a roaring debate on immigration and immigration reform. At a time when real economic growth in the global North continues to stagnate, and income inequality continues to intensify, conditions favor a certain kind of xenophobia that scapegoats immigrants for socioeconomic ills. Under such understandings, immigration influxes are portrayed as exogenous phenomena, but, in fact, migration from the global South to the global North often operates in a kind of boomerang effect. Current asylum and immigration patterns often reflect reactions to previous political and economic interventions by the global North in the home territories of the migrant populations. This article considers these background dynamics in relation to the immigration and asylum surge from Central America, and reflects on the interrelationship and utility of existing paradigms of migration law. A central finding criticizes the narrow understanding of ...

New: An Evolving Foreclosure Landscape: The Ibanez Case and Beyond

By Laura Underkuffler

Mortgage securitization, subprime lending, a persistently weak housing market, and an explosion of residential mortgage defaults – today’s homeowners and banks face a new and challenging landscape. Recently, courts in several states have issued decisions that alter the terrain for mortgage foreclosures. In Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York, among other states, courts have dismissed foreclosure actions on the basis of what might seem to be highly technical deficiencies in the pleading or proof. The most well-known–and controversial–in this cluster of cases is U.S. Bank National Ass’n v. Ibanez, decided by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts this year. In Ibanez, the court held that two assignee banks failed to obtain legal title to foreclosed properties because they failed to prove that they held valid assignments of the foreclosed mortgages at the moment that the foreclosure proceedings were begun.

REVISION: Economic Rationality and Ethical Values in Design-Defect Analysis: The Trolley Problem and Autonomous Vehicles

By W. Bradley Wendel

The trolley problem is a well-known thought experiment in moral philosophy, used to explore issues such as rights, deontological reasons, and intention and the doctrine of double effect. Recently it has featured prominently in popular discussions of decision making by autonomous vehicle systems. For example, a Mercedes-Benz executive stated that, if faced with the choice between running over a child that had unexpectedly darted into the road and steering suddenly, causing a rollover accident that would kill the driver, an automated Mercedes would opt to kill the child. This paper considers not the ethical issues raised by such dilemmas, but the liability of vehicle manufacturers for injuries that foreseeably result from the design of autonomous systems. Some of the recent commentary on the liability of autonomous vehicle manufacturers suggests unfamiliarity with modern products liability law, particularly the design-defect standard in the Third Restatement of Torts. A superficial ...

REVISION: The Nonprime Mortgage Crisis and Positive Feedback Lending

By Charles K. Whitehead

The “great recession” of 2007–2009 was sparked by a bubble in U.S. housing prices, driven in turn by a bubble in nonprime mortgage lending. We collect evidence that the risk of a nonprime housing bubble (not the certainty, but a meaningful risk) should have been obvious to the main participants in the markets for nonprime lending and related mortgage-backed securities (nonprime MBS), including originators, securitizers, rating agencies, money managers, and institutional investors. Those who did not see the risk were, in many cases, willfully blind. We also discuss the strong positive feedback nature of typical nonprime mortgages. This positive feedback made it highly likely that, if nonprime housing prices flattened, let alone fell, they would soon crash and take many nonprime MBS with them. We discuss regulatory responses that might limit positive feedback lending, cause the next bubble to be smaller and less likely, and make the post-bubble aftermath less painful.